Alison More - Böcker

Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses - remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. However, careful scrutiny allows their voices to be heard. Drawing on an array of sources including religious rules, sermons, hagiographic vitae, and rapiaria, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It both emphasizes the innovative roles of women who transcended established forms of institutional religious life and reveals the ways in which historiographical habits have obscured the dynamic and fluid nature of their histories. By highlighting the development of irregular and extraregular communities and tracing the threads of monasticisation that wove their way around pious laywomen, this book draws attention to the vibrant and dynamic culture of feminine lay piety that persisted from the later middle ages onwards.

Transcending both academic disciplines and traditional categories of analysis, this collection illustrates the ways genders and sexualities could be constructed, subverted and transformed. Focusing on areas such as literature, hagiography, history, and art history, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early sixteenth century, the contributors examine the ways men and women lived, negotiated, and challenged prevailing conceptions of gender and sexual identity. In particular, their papers explore textual constructions and transformations of religious and secular masculinities and femininities; visual subversions of gender roles; gender and the exercise of power; and the role sexuality plays in the creation of gender identity. The methodologies which are used in this volume are relevant both to specialists of the Middle Ages and early modern periods, and to scholars working more broadly in fields that draw on contemporary gender studies.